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Solo Climber Reaches New Heights

Alex Honnold in Oregon in 2010. Earlier this month, he climbed Mount Watkins, El Capitan and Half Dome, the three biggest rock faces in Yosemite, in about 19 hours.Credit
Ben Moon

As a professional rock climber who often scales cliffs with nothing to save him should he fall, Alex Honnold has encountered plenty of harrowing moments. But early this month Honnold, a 26-year-old from Sacramento, found himself high on a face in Yosemite National Park in a creepy situation.

Honnold was attempting something no one had done before: climb the three biggest rock faces in the California park in succession, alone, and in less than 24 hours. Dubbed the triple, the task would mean scaling the sheer walls of Mount Watkins, El Capitan and Half Dome for a total of about 7,000 vertical feet of rock. For all but about 500 feet of it, Honnold planned to climb with no ropes or safety equipment at all. One mistake and he could die.

“There is nothing in sports that compares to this,” said John Long, who in 1975 was the first to scale El Capitan in a day with his partners Billy Westbay and Jim Bridwell. (Most people need about five days). “The physical exertion alone is amazing.”

Yet about halfway up the 2,000-foot-high south face of Mount Watkins, the first of the three big walls, Honnold faced another problem. Hordes of wingless insects called silverfish poured down the rock in biblical proportions. There Honnold was, dangling by his fingertips, with inch-long arthropods wiggling into his ears, tickling his neck and probing his mouth with wispy antennae.

The swarm hardly slowed him. By the time Honnold reached safe ground, he had climbed the route in a blistering 2 hours 20 minutes, believed to be a record. Most parties need several days.

The encounter with the silverfish was the latest twist for Honnold, whose feats over the past few years have made him the country’s most renowned rock climber. He has been featured on 60 Minutes, pictured on the cover of National Geographic magazine, and now earns six figures a year from speaking engagements and sponsors like The North Face, La Sportiva and Black Diamond. Honnold has become the closest thing to a celebrity that American rock climbing offers, with fawning fans who rush in to take pictures and get autographs.

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Alex Honnold in Oregon in 2010. The triple is perhaps Yosemite’s most spectacular enchainment, or “link-up” in climber lingo, and only a handful of people in the world — if that many — are capable of doing it in a day.Credit
Ben Moon

Honnold invited me to shadow him for a week in the park. Together with Sender Films, a Boulder, Colo.-based production company that specializes in rock climbing videos, we would have exclusive behind-the-scenes access to what many observers said could be a milestone in the history of climbing in Yosemite, a major epicenter where the elite come to push the bounds of their sport.

The triple is perhaps Yosemite’s most spectacular enchainment, or “link-up” in climber lingo, and only a handful of people in the world — if that many — are capable of doing it in a day. Depending on the routes taken, a climber faces at least 70 pitches (rope-lengths) with some holds so small that human fingers are physically incapable of grasping them. In those cases a climber must place gear onto the rock and then pull on that gear to aid in upward movement — a technique known as aid climbing. Using only your hands and feet to go up (with a rope to guard against a fatal fall) is called free climbing. When the triple was first completed in 2001 by Timmy O’Neill and Dean Potter, the two used a mix of aid- and free-climbing techniques to link the three faces in 23 hours 45 minutes, O’Neill said.

Honnold wanted to improve upon that style by going alone and using no gear or rope for most of it, a dangerous technique known as free-soloing.

To prepare himself, Honnold arrived in Yosemite in May and embarked on a climbing frenzy. He became the first to free solo the west face of El Capitan and the first, along with fellow professional climber Tommy Caldwell, to free climb the triple. They did it in about 21 hours.

“That alone is a huge step up because they are not pulling on any gear at all,” said Peter Croft, who with John Bachar in 1986 was the first to link two Yosemite big walls — Half Dome and El Capitan — in a day.

Honnold kept the blogosphere humming with more accomplishments. On June 1, he climbed the iconic 2,000-foot-high northwest face of Half Dome, alone, with a mix of aid- and free-soloing techniques in a staggering 1:21 — 48 minutes faster than his previous record. On Sunday, Honnold and Hans Florine, a Yosemite speed climber, hope to break another speed record climbing The Nose route up El Capitan. Potter and Sean Leary currently hold that record at 2:35:45.

But the solo triple, if successful, was most likely to go down as one of Honnold’s greatest achievements. After he summited Mount Watkins and the silverfish were gone, he hiked through the highlands to the white Ford van he calls home for much of the year. He whipped it around the curves driving back down into the valley while his girlfriend, Stacey Pearson, a 26-year-old nurse, cooked him dinner on a camping stove in the back. By 9:30 p.m., Pearson, Peter Mortimer of Sender Films, and I stood at the base of El Capitan while Honnold prepared to climb the 2,900-foot-high Nose route through the night. There were dozens of people already on the wall preparing for bed in hanging platforms they had hauled up.

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Alex Honnold in Oregon in 2010. After he completed the triple, he took off his shoes, asked for some Oreos and was mobbed by dozens of onlookers who wanted to know how he felt.Credit
Ben Moon

“I feel like I’m forgetting something,” Honnold said.

“Aren’t you going to tie your shoes?” Pearson asked.

“Not until I start rock climbing,” he said, already 30 feet up the cliff.

Back at the van we discovered what Honnold had forgotten: a chalk bag that he would need to keep his hands dry and able to grip the wet slippery rock. The horror of what Honnold was facing gave us all pause and Mortimer quickly called some of his cameramen filming the feat to see if Honnold was in trouble. He was not.

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“There’s a guy climbing alone and really fast,” said Colin Delehanty, a lensman who was shooting time-elapsed footage. “That has to be him.”

About 1,000 feet up Honnold borrowed chalk from a group of climbers he encountered, and by 3:30 a.m. he was at the top and bound for Half Dome, which he began climbing at around 8 a.m.

Watching Honnold complete the final pitches up the northwest face was terrifying and impressive. I had hiked to the top in time for sunrise. Around 10:30 a.m. I peered into the dizzying abyss below and Honnold was about 300 feet from the top, without a rope, moving with insectlike mechanicalness. He waved at Pearson, who had come up earlier that morning. It was clear that even now, exhausted as he was, Honnold was climbing far below his ability and that it was unlikely he would fall.

“Oh my god!” shouted a hiker who saw him. “That guy has no rope!”

“Dude, are you serious!” exclaimed another. “I can’t look.”

Honnold reached the summit shortly before 11 a.m., about 19 hours after he started Mount Watkins. He took off his shoes, asked for some Oreos, and was mobbed by dozens of onlookers who wanted to know how he felt.

“Fragile,” he said. “I am going to turn my brain off and stagger downhill now. That was kind of a big deal.”